What Causes Skin Conditions?

When it comes to health issues, few problems alarm us like skin conditions.  No matter what our state of health, we all like to look our best.  Breakouts on our faces, our most visible feature, can be both alarming and embarrassing.  Information and articles that we’ve published before on skincare and avoiding toxic beauty products remain a popular subject.  In our recent Cellular Health TV interviews with Dr. Ben Johnson of Osmosis Skincare, we took an in depth look at the root sources behind skin problems.  As you can expect with us and our commitment to truly healing the cell in order to heal the body, the answers go way beyond skin deep.

Watch our interview with Dr. Ben Johnson for groundbreaking information on what causes skin conditions like acne, eczema, or rosacea. Dr. Johnson is a medical doctor and expert on holistic skincare. He uses his Osmosis Skincare line to advance his goal of changing the direction of skincare away from harsh products and procedures, and towards effective, alternative strategies that treat skin from the inside out.

Your skin is your largest organ. It’s designed to function as a barrier between you and the outside environment, but it’s not impenetrable. Skin is porous, meant for certain substances like waste materials and toxins to exit (via the pores) or for nutrients like magnesium to enter. Like all of the other systems in our bodies, our skin system, or integumentary system, is dynamic in nature, able to adjust itself to changing environments and to repair damage. Also like our other body systems, the skin is subject to developing problems when factors interfere with its natural ability to perform optimally. Let’s look at some of these factors now.

Major Causes of Skin Conditions

The causes of skin conditions, including acne, rosacea, eczema, and psoriasis can be myriad. In fact, my own experience in getting sick and my journey back to health taught me that the root causes are often multiple. There are a few factors that both Dr. Johnson’s and my experiences have shown to be major players behind most of the skin conditions from which people suffer. These are:

• Candida overgrowth
• Hormone disruption, usually from estrogen-like compounds.
• Toxins in the food that we eat, our environment, and in products that we put directly on our skin.

Dr. Johnson has spent a lot of time researching and amalgamating his experiences working with various skin conditions. He has compiled his observations into a very useful face map, which may help you to find links between where you’re having skin breakouts and internal issues that may be exacerbating them.

Candida Overgrowth

Candida albicans, usually known simply as Candida, is a yeast-like fungus that is responsible for many fungal infections on the body. Overgrowth of Candida in the body can lead to numerous health issues, including the facial breakouts that we’re focusing on today. Candida is considered to be the worst of the three triggers for skin conditions. Dr. Johnson links Candida overgrowth in the body to acne or rosacea on the upper face (forehead, temples, cheeks), sebaceous hyperplasia, seborrheic dermatitis, psoriasis, and eczema.

If Candida overgrowth is causing skin breakouts and other systemic issues, you may love Skin Perfection from Osmosis Skincare, which is specially formulated for digestive health, rosacea recovery, and detox for psoriasis and eczema conditions.

Hormone Disruption and Acne

When hormone imbalances cause breakouts on the face or body, it’s nearly always estrogen-like compounds that are the culprit. Today’s western culture is sadly loaded with materials that on the molecular level look similar enough to estrogen to fool the body, occupying hormone receptors on the cell membrane and disrupting proper function. Look for these imposters:

• Plant estrogens in processed foods, especially those containing unfermented soy.
• Xenoestrogens in plastics and other synthetic materials.
• Halogenated compounds like chlorine and other toxins. You may recall from our article on thyroid health that chlorine has links to several health issues. Refer back to that article for tips on how to reduce your exposure to chlorine and similar elements like fluorine and bromine.

Learn more about environmental toxins and how to remove them here – CHTV Episode 101: Toxic Top 10

Dr. Johnson often finds that estrogen disruption is associated with acne on the lower cheeks, jawline, or around the mouth. His specially formulated product H2O Hormone Health may be helpful with estrogenic toxicity.

Other Toxins That Aggravate Skin Disease

Though Candida and estrogen toxicity are the big players in aggravating skin conditions, other toxins can work against efforts to restore your skin. Mold exposure, or heavy metals like mercury and lead, disrupt cell activity and may even work synergistically with other toxins to worsen deleterious effects. I learned this the hard way. When I was going through my health troubles, the heavy metal toxicity that I had interfered with my efforts to control Candida overgrowth in my body. Until I fixed the mercury toxicity, I couldn’t fully restore my cells. It’s no different with skin conditions, which I also experienced when I was sick.

Learn more about heavy metal detox in the “When Detox is Dangerous” series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Preservatives in the food we eat and in body care products often contain compounds that accumulate in the body, weakening our immune systems, and putting a burden on our liver and kidneys. Problems with waste removal and the liver often show up on the skin. Dr. Johnson has found that acne, melasma, and rosacea are often aggravated by toxic waste removal problems.

Though stress isn’t usually called a toxin, there are established links between emotional health and the onset or worsening of chronic diseases. A recent study verified a link between patients suffering from rosacea and a hypersensitivity to triggers in the parasympathetic system¹, suggesting that those with rosacea are responding abnormally to stressors. The parasympathetic nervous system has connections to the limbic system, the “flight-or-flight” part of the brain, as we explored in our interview with Suzanne Rucker, focusing on emotional health. This is the part of the brain that triggers in times of stress, causing cellular and metabolic changes designed to handle dangerous situations. When stress becomes chronic, these changes, which were never meant to be constantly engaged, can cause harm to the body over time. Dr. Johnson notes that rosacea and eczema often have strong links to heavy stress levels.

Tips for Reducing Breakouts

Now that we know that proper skincare involves caring for the body inside AND out, here are a few tips that you can implement to develop strong, healthy, and radiant skin.

I can’t stress enough the importance of a multi-therapeutic approach to health, including dietary changes to reduce sugar and inflammatory foods LINK TOXIC FOODS, and ancient healing techniques like intermittent fasting to calm the gut and encourage cell restoration. This approach is necessary no matter what the cause of your skin disease, as it’s instrumental in driving down inflammation, detoxing the cells, reducing Candida levels, and eliminating unwanted hormone exposure. The gut-brain-skin connection is well established in both scientific studies and in observational evidence. Working to heal all of the body’s systems will show benefits in skin restoration. Heal the cells, heal the skin.

Osmosis Skincare products are available to you at our Revelation Health site. Osmosis focuses on natural ingredients that help to restore radiant skin inside and out. We love the effects of these products and are excited to be able to offer them to you to purchase easily online. You can learn more about our personal experiences using these products and their amazing benefits by watching our first CHTV interview with founder Dr. Ben Johnson.

Eat organic as much as possible. Avoid GMO foods, hybridized wheat, and conventional meats like feedlot beef and factory raised chicken to reduce exposure to toxic chemicals, hormones, and antibiotics. Reduce sugar and dairy intake to help drive down Candida levels. Current mainstream science largely refuses to acknowledge a direct link between the foods that we eat and skin breakouts. We know, however, that what we eat and are exposed to not only have a direct connection to how well cells function, but are essential to proper cell function and energy synthesis. Research is just beginning to return to this link. One recent study² showed that a diet with a high glycemic load coupled with heavy dairy intake was positively associated with acne breakouts.

Avoid storing food in plastic containers or using non-stick pans for cooking. Even BPA-free products can pose a danger. Try using glass storage containers and nonreactive metal cookware instead.

Consider all of the triggers when looking for the root causes of your skin condition. The standard American diet and exposure to toxins almost guarantees that you’ll have multiple issues behind your breakouts. This is why I stress the importance of what I call R1 of True Cellular Detox and Healing™: find the triggers for your disease. You have to look at ALL of the factors that could be affecting your cells. Eliminate those factors, even before you proceed with further treatment, or you may find those treatments are less effective. The 5R’s of True Cellular Detox and Healing™ is broken down into steps for exactly this reason.

So often in modern medicine, symptom management is the full extent of “treating” a disease, but this is almost never going to lead to an actual cure. As Dr. Johnson notes in our interview with reference to typical skin disease medications, “When you suppress your immune system, nothing works right. So your skin, which would normally shed to help get rid of toxins, actually is completely disabled by the medication. It’s not that it makes your skin healthier. It disables it. The same thing is true with a lot of cases of antibiotics. You don’t have an infection, but you feel better only because you’ve knocked out the inflammatory process, which in this case, is a healing process.” People are crying out for better answers. Thankfully alternative health practitioners like Dr. Johnson are willing to devote energy to supplying those answers.

• CHTV Episode 123: The Root of Skin Disease with Dr. Ben Johnson
• Toxic Beauty Products
• R1: Removing the Source of Toxins
• True Cellular Detox – A Top 5 Strategy to Create Your Best Health Ever
• Dr. Pompa’s Top 10 Toxic Foods
• Could Your Thyroid Be Why You Are Not Feeling Well?
• CHTV Episode 101: Toxic Top 10
• CHTV Episode 106: Mold Illness and Mold Remediation
• When Detox is Dangerous Series: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3
• Emotional Trauma, Detox, and EMDR Therapy
• CHTV Episode 109: Trauma Therapy and the 5R’s of Emotional Detox
• CHTV Episode 117: Multi-Therapeutic Approach (MTA)
• CHTV Episode 11: The Power of Intermittent Fasting
• CHTV Episode 120: Cellular Healing for the Skin with Dr. Ben Johnson
• CHTV Episode 6: GMOs, Grains and Gluten
• CHTV Episode 8: Herbicides, Heart Disease & Hormones

1.  Metzler-Wilson, K., K. Toma, DL Sammons, S. Mann, AJ Jurovcik, O. Demidova, and TE Wilson. “Augmented Supraorbital Skin Sympathetic Nerve Activity Responses to Symptom Trigger Events in Rosacea Patients.” PubMed. July 1, 2015. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26133800.
2. Hansani Ismail, Noor, Zahara Abdul Manaf, and Noor Zalmy Azizan. “High Glycemic Load Diet, Milk and Ice Cream Consumption Are Related to Acne Vulgaris in Malaysian Young Adults: A Case Control Study.” PubMed. August 12, 2012. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3470941/.

• Osmosis Skincare
• Magnesium Buffered Chelate
• Candida Complex